By Athena Liu, Public Discourse. (Photo: James Coleman)
In past generations, many children grew up surrounded by sacred reminders of God’s presence in their daily lives. They knelt by their beds to pray words they had memorized from church. They saw the cross above the door as a sign that God was near. A Bible, its pages soft from years of use, was more than a book—it was a treasure. These symbols and practices cultivated a way of seeing the world as infused with meaning, beauty, and divine purpose. My generation, by and large, does not have these markers. We have grown up in a world where sacred symbols feel like a foreign language. Our culture has trained us to strip everything down to function, to treat symbols as mere decoration, and to roll our eyes at the idea that everyday life could be filled with divine purpose. This is not just a cultural quirk—it is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It shapes how we understand education, family, and religion, leaving us unable to recognize transcendent meaning in the ordinary.
Education and Family: Losing the Language of the Sacred
Consider the average classroom today. Past generations were raised on stories that conveyed timeless moral truths—parables from Scripture, myths that taught virtues, and literature that lifted the soul. Today’s classrooms often strip stories of their moral power, analyzing them purely for technique, historical context, or social commentary. While analysis is important, something vital is lost when stories are treated as artifacts rather than moral compasses. Many of my peers read The Chronicles of Narnia without seeing its deeper allegory or sense of cosmic order. They read To Kill a Mockingbird as merely a story about prejudice in the South, not as a vision of human dignity and moral courage. Stories no longer call us upward—they are dissected, flattened, and emptied of transcendence. This loss in education means we fail to cultivate students’ moral imaginations, leaving them unprepared to see deeper meaning in the world.